Not all of this is applicable to paying the bills for other online communities, but here's a couple things we've tried on Improbable Island.

1. Adverts! We used to have banner ads across the top of the site. If I earned a buck a day with a banner ad, that was a good day. It's not 1999 anymore, adverts don't earn money unless you're doing the creepy spyware stuff that right from the start I knew I never wanted to do.

2. Optional adverts! If you paid a fiver you could get rid of them.

Opt-out ads earned even less money, and if you're bothered enough to pay 5c to remove ads you'll just block them, never mind $5.

3. Opt IN adverts! Ads were off by default and if you wanted to support the site you could turn them on! We really did this! Yes! Yes we did! It failed! People VASTLY overestimate how much you can make from running ads, and instead of giving a fiver they'd earn us 0.05c in advertising revenue.

The problem with running adverts on any basis is that the people who were inclined to donate money to keep the site running, the people who think about how much it must cost and what must go into it and go "Hmm, I like this place, wonder how I can help," will just disable their adblocker and earn you a couple pennies, when they'd happily give you a fiver.

When we cut off all ads, even the opt-in ones, donations tripled. It was like people suddenly remembered that clicking doesn't do anything.

4. Merchandise!

Don't do merchandise. Don't do merchandise even if people are begging you to do merchandise. For every twenty people who say they'll buy a T-shirt, one will, and for their tenner you'll get a dollar in profit. Their motivation for buying a T-shirt was to give you twelve dollars, they've already got T-shirts, they don't *really* want the T-shirt, just let them give you the tenner.

Even logistics and inventory aside, it gets worse...

If people see that you're selling merch, they'll think "They're making a fortune in merch, I don't need to donate," and then they won't donate AND they won't buy the merch!

Just do a donation meter. When it gets full, everybody gets a little something and the ones who donate get a little something extra. Simple.

Remind people that there are no ads (most won't notice, or assume there are ads they've blocked) and ask politely for some money. Be straightforward about it. Don't be sneaky.

christ this whole thread is like the opposite of what all the big sites do isn't it

If you wanna be a big site with millions of users obviously don't do any of this

(who the hell wants a big site with millions of users, that sounds like a heart attack before 40 to me)

I wanna reemphasize the merch thing. People just don't buy it. And it was good merch, y'know, we didn't half-arse it - we did voting on the designs, get people invested, everything you're supposed to do, had a list hundreds-long of everyone who'd said "OMFG TAKE MY MONEY" to a given design. Sold maybe 20 in 2 years, while donations cratered. Took away the merch link, donations went up again.

If you still think merch is a good idea: have you ever seen someone wearing a website T-shirt?

Aaahhhhh time for another nice cool glass of bollocks, it's internet community management thread part 3.14

Couple people have asked me hey put this in a blog or something so I can submit it to hacker news or reddit or whatevs, and that reminded me to talk about advertising and where your traffic comes from

Some communities might get good spread by word-of-mouth, but tbh you can't rely on that - especially if you run the sort of community where people enjoy trying on new identities like hats, figuring out which ones fit nice. They don't want to bring their real-life mates into that, they want to chat with semianonymous internet people.

(bookmark for myself later, talk about avatars & user differentiation dan)

The other reason you can't rely on it is normal people don't really talk about websites.

Anyway the importance of NOT targeting your ads is threefold.

First, targeted ads are creepy, scummy and privacy-invading.

Second, they're really expensive and they don't bloody work.

Third, if you target your ads towards people who already like your stuff, then you won't find people who do not yet know that they like your stuff.

You want that moment of serendipity. You want people stumbling across something they weren't looking for and falling in love with it. You want people to randomly find a thing that fits into a slot in their life that they didn't know was there. You want your site associated with that feeling!

Most new visitors will bounce straight away, but a few will go "Oh my god this is perfect for me!" and no algorithm can find those people. Algorithms only find people what they already like, nothing new.

Anyway it's important to go and LOOK at the site you're thinking of advertising on, and ask yourself "Are the people who regularly visit this website gonna be nice friendly people who I'd quite happily have a pint with, or a bunch of screaming dickheads?"

Don't try to match the subject of your site vs the publisher site, look more at the tone. Feel the place out. Don't advertise on Reddit (super toxic community and they inflate the ad click numbers) or American tech sites (freezepeach).

Unrelated, but do look at encyclopedia dramatica, kiwifarms, any LJ or fandom drama archives you can find, these are absolutely godawful websites but they often illustrate in exhausting detail the ways that communities implode or explode, and trolls will quite happily show off their moves so you can recognize when they try the same on you.

(I reiterate, they're awful and often upsetting websites, view at own risk)

To sum up the thread on online community management so far:

* Nazis are nothing to worry about;
* Encyclopedia Dramatica is full of very useful information;
* You should absolutely ban whoever you want for whatever reason you please;
* Admins who do a really terrible job deserve a break;
* It's really important that you make sure you get paid, but make sure you don't give people anything tangible in return.

pls feel free to boost and screencap this toot devoid of its context

There's a big difference between how a new admin might expect managing a community to be like, and what's actually involved, and the gulf between idea and reality is where young Fediverse places in particular end up falling offline due to admin burnout.

The idea is that it's like hosting a party, and you're a social, empathic people-person so that sounds great!

In reality, sometimes, you will have to deliberately hurt someone.

**You will have to deliberately hurt someone.**

On hurting someone, knowing you're being it and doing it on purpose, for one example out of many banning a user who's become unhealthily obsessed with the site and is hurting others: it's tempting to say "You have to be okay with occasionally hurting people," but you don't really have to be okay with it, as long as you get it done.

It doesn't get easier, but every one of these events lets you spot the warning signs sooner so things don't get so bad. That's what pain's for, making you remember.

Oh yikes we got into the dark again, let's balance that out: it's about sixty of my players' birthdays today!

A big online community is a MASSIVE WAVE OF HUMANITY and the connections formed between users are real and lasting and yikes I wouldn't still be doing this if it weren't TOTALLY WORTH IT.

Y'know when you ask how someone's been and they tell you for an hour and then finish with "It's..." and wave their hands around and finally say "a lot." Well, it's a lot, and it's a lot of good too.

I couldn't remember what I'd talked about already so I went back and reread what I wrote in the thread and IT TOOK ME TWENTY SODDING MINUTES

THIS THREAD ONLY STARTED OFF BECAUSE I WAS BEING SNARKY ABOUT A BLOODY SUBREDDIT

Couple weeks ago I was bitching about every videogame making you spend an hour wading through a sewer, what happened

Alright night Fedi, more tomorrow maybe

Online Community Management Thread pt19, user differentiation

This is gonna be one where you see the tech side of things affect the social side of things. Round here I see a lot of folks talking about how you can't solve social problems with technical solutions, that's true to an extent but it does encourage folks to think of the social/technical sides in binary ways. That's not good because they're proper interwoven and changes to one affect the other.

You've gotta let users have avatars, and you've gotta put their names above or to the side of their post in the same font size as what they're saying.

You can even let users colour in their names, either as standard or as an optional feature for donators (to ensure accessibility you can have them pick from a limited palette).

This helps users tell each other apart and visually recognize folks they're starting to know and like, which helps friendships form.

Having your users able to tell each other apart easily, and giving them a way to express their identity outside of their actual posts, leads to a community of people who actually, like, know each other.

It also adds one more thing to moderate, but it's not that tricky. (don't allow animated avatars - trolls upload gifs of a minute of a lovely flower (for your avatar approval screen) and then a few seconds of porn or gore)

To you and me, "community" means people who you know and recognize and talk to. Sites like Reddit and Slashdot, places were users don't really know each other, they have a different idea of what that word means - it's less like interaction and more like, IDK, kinda surfing a wave of emotion.

They tend to be full of lonely young men who remain lonely despite talking to people all day.

Let users differentiate themselves, visually and obviously, in as many ways as you can think of.

Internet Community Management Thread pt32: mod comms

I've been blessed on Improbable Island with a really awesome mod team. Now you'll likely have to set up a mod team at some point and it's good to get mods from all over the world, so that the timezones are staggered and you don't get "Mods are asleep post butts" events. Also so that you get international viewpoints on things - other countries aren't smaller versions of America, they're other countries and they have cultures.

It's important that you and your mods communicate. Have some kind of dedicated comms channel or subforum or something for mod chat.

Any time a mod->member interaction happens, first check the log before doing anything beyond locking or deleting posts.

Actions on content depend on the content and should be viewed as objectively as possible - actions on members take member history into account. If the member's doing something they've been told five times not to do, then you need to escalate.

After doing whatever, log what happened and ping the mods to tell 'em what's up.

If you're not keeping logs of member naughtiness then the same creep will do the same creepy thing five times before the mods figure out he's done it more than once. That's an environment in which creeps, predators and abusers can flourish.